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From the ARCHIVE
In ‘Fiddlers on Canvas’, The Strad surveys paintings at the London art exhibitions of interest to string players. The young lady ‘lost in reverie’ (below) grows up to be Agatha Christie
We wonder to what extent violinists in general are disposed to patronise the sister art of painting. Perhaps not as much as they should do, though this is only surmise on our part. The elevating and inspiring effect of the grandest works of art should appeal very forcibly to students of our most poetic and inspired instrument. But, apart from this view of the influence one art may exercise over the followers of another, violinists will find much to interest them specially in the year’s exhibition of the Royal Academy. And, though art criticism is not supposed to be within the province of a fiddler’s paper, we think there may be many of our readers who will like to have some particulars thereof.
The first to attract the fiddler’s eye will be No. 45, “Under a Spell” by Percy M. Teasdale. An old country man playing on a fiddle to his grandson, who sits in rapt amazement at the doubtless beautiful strains issuing from the typical farm house instrument played on by the elder. The colouring is good and the play of firelight on the child’s face adds not a little to the poetry of the picture.
A four-year-old Agatha Miller (later Christie) in Lost in Reverie
BROADWAY STUDIOS
No. 227, “Rehearsing the ‘Miserere’: Spain,” by J. B. Burgess, R.A., a group of peasant lads and two priests, one of the latter is playing the violin. His attitude is perfect, positions of the hands being all that the greatest stickler for technique could desire. This is rarely found in paintings. The faces of the choristers are beautifully rendered, as, in fact, are those of the priests, particularly the one in the foreground, whose listening expression is suggestive of the re-awakening of long buried memories. No. 372, “Lost in Reverie” by J. Douglas Connah. An endlessly slender young lady violinist in an endless salmon-coloured dress and with an endless expression of melancholy on her face. The music is not in evidence so we cannot say whose “Reverie” she has got lost in; perhaps Vieuxtemps’, she may be thinking of the octaves. She has the appearance of having sunk in her chair wearied by long struggling with an obstinate peg. We would suggest as an alternative title, “Shall I never get it in tune?”
